


Kjæreste

by englishable



Series: Hieros Gamos [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 23:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18788218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Of all the things Thor has asked Sif to do for him, in their centuries of friendship, cutting his hair is perhaps the oddest, but Sif decides she won't ask too many questions.





	Kjæreste

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this on Tumblr and then changed my mind again about the title (as well as several other things), so apologies if you're seeing it twice. Meant as a continuation of "Shield-Maiden," sort of.

…

For as long as Sif has known him –  more or less her whole life, that is to say, back to childhood where her memories either start or stop depending which way you are looking  – Thor has always been somewhat vain about his hair.

But no, Sif thinks. Vain might not be the proper word. He has always been a little prideful about it, maybe, sensitive of it in much the same way as a rooster is about his tail, which is why it surprises her when Thor asks her to cut it for him.

“It’s either you or the tree.” Thor uses the scissors to gesture at his hair. It has been recently washed but still hangs ragged past his shoulders. “I’d leave it to that fellow in the mirror, except I’m not sure I trust him to do it right.”

Sif is seated on a bunk the man named Star-Lord has given her aboard _the Benatar_. Her bed is nearest to the airlock, so that she sleeps with an odd humming in her bones, although this sound may in fact be a residual effect of being turned to ash by the infinity stones and then reassembled in, presumably, the right order. Sif has lived aboard this ship for a week, after they found her on some remote world, and cannot say for sure which it is.

The others are on the flight deck playing some game that involves making little goal posts between their fingers. The Luphomoid woman with the metal skull, who is named for those clouds of interstellar dust the mortals call the Pillars of Creation, has explained the game’s rules with exacting sincerity and appears to be winning.

 Sif takes the scissors from Thor’s hand.

“Sit, then.” She slides to the edge of the mattress. “And don’t fidget. I might cut your ear off if you do.”

She expects him to drag a chair over, or a box, but Thor turns his back to her and sits with a stolid, forthright permanence between her knees. “Cut away, Lady Sif. I’ve still got one of those spare.”

He stretches both legs out in front of him, folds the gray-gloved hands in his lap and occasionally raises them to indicate places where the hair trails into his face, or to show her how far up a strand he wants her to trim. There are stray knots and Sif teases these loose with the comb he presents to her next. The only other movement is the measured rise of his chest and belly as he breathes, which he stops doing for a moment when the scissor blades pass too near his false right eye.

Locks of hair fall around him and Sif swaps them briskly off his shoulders. Her sword-arm is weakened by the new scar that runs its whole length, up to her bicep, but her hands seem steady enough to manage the job without any unmitigated disasters.

This thought causes another to pull itself free from her brain, like plucking a bead off a string. It might be the brightness of his hair that reminds her.

“Do you remember those old stories the mortals used to tell about me?”

She lifts another strand of Thor’s hair away. She can feel the warmth of his shoulder pressed against the inside of her knee and she lifts one bare foot off the floor, balancing its weight on her curled toes.

“The Goddess Sif of the Golden Hair,” she continues. “They said my hair was so lovely, everyone considered it one of the great treasures of Asgard – to tell the truth, I think they had me confused with you for all those years.” She puts his hair into order by carding her fingers through it, as business-like as she can manage. She did the same thing when they were children together. “And you, they thought you rode through the sky on a chariot pulled by goats – I can’t recall what their names were supposed to be. Tooth – it started with ‘Tooth,’ I’m sure. Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder, weren’t they?  And your thunder was the sound of their hooves.” Sif bows her head lower. Cold air moves around her bare neck where her own hair has been shorn off. “Funny people, those Norsemen. I was fond of them. They all reminded me of Volstagg.”

Thor does not answer. Sif closes her mouth.

And vanity probably is the right word for it, she decides, in a way. Sif has always been able to survive on the things she carries inside herself, safe within the hard armor of her obedience and her loyalty and her codes; Thor has always survived on the things outside himself, on the faith and affections of those around him, because there is no armor or hardness to his heart anywhere and he feels nothing by halves, gives nothing by halves and lives nothing by halves either. Even as a child Sif would wonder, and would worry about what might happen when whatever-it-was within the cheerful, brash, tireless, quick-tempered and loving boy she knew finally used itself up.

Sif goes on combing and cutting his hair, working out the looser tangles with her fingernails. After a while of this silence, Thor speaks. 

“Is there –” he stops for a long pause; Sif lifts her hands away “– when something happens to you, do you ever find yourself thinking over how you’ll tell about it to him?”

Sif slicks the scissors clean against a towel and remembers Volstagg laughing until his face was nearly the same red color as his hair.

“Yes,” she says, although she has not had anything funny to report in a good long while. “I’ll start imagining which parts he’d like best so I can make him wait for those until the end.”

Thor’s shoulders jerk in a single laugh. His back is still towards her. “I’m sure Fandral would interrupt you before you got that far – or else Hogun would guess the ending first and finish the story ahead of you.”

“Well, then, I’d just have to make something up and have you swear to it as my witness.” Sif bows further over so that she can look him in the eye, upside down. “Could I trust you to that, my liege?”

He smiles, which sharpens the new creases around his eyes. It looks as though he has trimmed the beard slightly, too. “Oh, I don’t imagine you’d need the strength of my testimony to convince anybody. Loki always said you were a better liar than you realized.”

Thor is the one to shut his mouth, this time. A liquid brightness comes into his eyes.

Sif sits back again quickly to lay the scissors aside. It is the first time she has heard him say Loki’s name since they found her, although she knows Loki is dead – for the third, last time – and that Thanos killed him alongside the other men and women and children aboard the refugee ship. Thor has spoken of his brother many times by omission, of course, in the last seven days, by pronominal reference or by the mere fact that Loki is the fixed point around which the whole path of Thor’s life has circled, again and again like the centering arm of a mapmaker’s compass. All courses lead back to him eventually.

Thor ducks his head and brushes something from his face.

“You know, I keep imagining it’s another of his tricks,” he says. “Five years later and I’m still waiting for him to walk out of the air and stab me as a way to say hello.”

 “That would be the expected thing on his part, wouldn’t it?” Sif considers putting her hands on his shoulders but decides against it. He has made no move to stand up from where he sits but has made no move to touch her, either. “And then you’d forgive him as soon as you’d plugged the bleeding – that’d be the expected part on your end.”

Thor dries his face again with the back of his hand and laughs. “Probably.”

Sif thinks. She is not sure she ever enjoyed Loki’s company too much, for Loki himself, except she doubts she ever really saw Loki for himself in the first place. Perhaps that was greater part of what he resented: but Thor’s love for his brother has always acted as a sort of prism, a thing that changed and brightened whatever passed through it, and it is this strange, unsearchably simple love that allows Sif to say what she does next.

“He may fool you yet, though,” Sif tells him. “Maybe his next trick will be to let you forgive yourself.”

Thor is very still, so that Sif thinks he has not heard her, until he nods. Carefully, Sif takes two strands of hair from just above his ears and plaits them together behind his head; from this high view it looks like a circling crown.

…

**Author's Note:**

> The title is (or so I'm told, as a non-speaker) the Norwegian word for "dearest," or "beloved one," though I may be stupendously incorrect. If so, let me know.
> 
> Thanks as always for reading.


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